K2 REVISION SHEET.

K2 - This topic area will assess your understanding of the key legislation and their features in terms of food
safety, health and safety and critical control points. Questions may cover: Health and Safety at Work Act; Food
Safety and Hygiene Regulations; HACCP, TACCP and VACCP; Processes of and the management of risk and risk
assessments.

Health and safety at work act.

HASAWA 1974 or Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 was enacted in England to protect employees or workers health and
safety at workplace. It aims to minimize the risk involved at a workplace and looks after the welfare of the people working.
It clearly lays down guidelines and duties for employers, contractors, managers, people in control at work, employees, and
general persons. The European union laws of workplace health and safety also takes into account the HASAWA 1974 act. It
sets out the general duties which:

 Employers have towards employees and members of the public

 Employees have to themselves and to each other
 Certain self-employed have towards themselves and others

Management Regulations - Businesses are required to have good and working health and safety management in place.
They should be competent in their workplace risk assessment and with required first aid. Proper documented information
regarding health and safety at work. Proper training should be provided to required individuals. health and safety
regulations the management should have a working cooperation between all the workplace duty holders. A regular risk
assessment should be carried out by the management. This is for a typical office. A company that deals in any hazardous
materials, oil rig, chemical plant, power station, laboratory etc need to do a thorough and complex risk assessment.

If you are a company with fewer than 5 employees, then generally you don’t need to have a written regulation document.
For a company bigger than that you should have a regulation document. This doesn’t mean that you should do a lot of
regulation paperwork but instead do a risk assessment have measures to identify them and be prepared with procedures.

The below points will help to properly formulate a workplace regulation policy.

 Conduct a risk assessment of your workplace.

 Implement or arrange for health and safety measures as per the risk assessment document.
 Designate a person among the staff to implement the safety measures.
 Setup an emergency procedure.
 Communicate to your employees about these measures and conduct training sessions.
 Regularly review the risk assessment and the corresponding safety measures.

Health and safety reports – Health and safety reports are an integral part of every company consisting of various kinds
of activities which have potential hazards and could be a source of accidents. Developing a safety report is a legal
requirement and international standards recommend the same to be maintained promptly. The report could be monthly,
quarterly, half yearly or yearly. The report consists of the details of recorded incidents that happened due to floors, roofs,
falling objects, vehicles, unguarded machinery, equipment, overhead power cables, power tools, heat, and other
different activities. The report also consists of the employee information as how many average employees are present daily
and the total number of work hours.

Further the report will have to be written about the project safety activities like inspection conducted, risk assessment
conducted and the outcome of the same. It is the ultimate responsibility of the employer to develop a proper standard
procedure for maintaining the health and safety report department wise or the project or activity wise. This is done at the
different levels like supervisor will develop a report of the area under his purview and this leverages to the manager till
director for health and safety.

Define the Objective of the safety report first:

  The report starts with an introduction on the issue to be reported. It summarizes the whole report on the
particular issue.
 The maintenance of the equipment or explanation of the accidents at the workplace and standard procedures
that need to be followed.
 A safety report covers almost every aspect that a person needs to know about the workplace. The report also
includes about the interviews and discussions he had with the employees during the inspection.

Any safety report must follow a proper format which should be in a proper presentation with simple and precise language
with easily understandable terminologies without less or no jargon. One of the drawbacks of the safety reports is filling up
the content which is not required much. While writing a report we need to consider the background of the employees and
their understanding of the language. The report need not necessarily be in English rather the language which the majority
of the employees understand. Report writing is a teamwork explaining the scope of the report along with the interviews,
surveys, inspections, and questionnaires used if any. Even a small mistake sometimes could lead to an accident major or
minor depending on the instructions given and even legal procedures be initiated if a report is not maintained properly.
Goals of the writing a health and Safety Report is to demonstrate:

 A clear accident prevention policy maintaining a health and safety management system
 That a proper procedure is followed in writing about the possible accidents and their preventive measures so
that consequences could be minimized.
 That a proper inspection has been done in the workplace including the equipment, machinery, hazardous areas,
and the operations that happen in the workplace.
 To elaborate the emergency measures that are intact and as per the emergency evacuation measures plan and
procedures.
To maintain the report very precise, neat, and clear for the health and safety officials as and when inspection happens.

Food safety and hygiene regulations.

HACCP.
HACCP stands for the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point system and is a proactive process control system that identifies
where hazards might occur in the food production process and puts into place stringent preventative actions to take to
stop the hazards from occurring.

7 Steps to HACCP:

1. Conduct a hazard analysis

2. Identify critical control points

3. Establish critical limits

4. Establish monitoring procedures

5. Establish corrective actions

6. Verify procedures

7. Document procedures

HACCP breaks down hazards into 4 key groups to allow them to become more easily identifiable.

4 key groups -

 Physical – A physical foreign body, that can be seen in the product. E.g., Plastic from a mould, glass
fragment, metal.

 Chemical- Can be dangerous for consumption. E.g., Cleaning residue left on a surface, non-food safe
products getting into the product. Others include pesticides and preservatives.

 Microbial- Can’t be seen but is dangerous for consumption. E.g., Salmonella, E. coli.
  Allergenic- Cross contamination of allergens into products that are not labelled as containing the
allergen. E.g., Dairy products or nuts.

From HACCP come CCPs which are specific measures put in place to control the specific hazards that come with the
process.

Consumers should have confidence that their food is safe. The key responsibilities for all food businesses under the Food
Safety Act 1990 are to ensure that:

  Businesses do not include anything in food, remove anything from food or treat food in any way which means it
would be damaging to the health of people eating it.

  The food businesses serve, or sell is of the nature, substance, or quality which consumers would expect.

  The food is labelled, advertised, and presented in a way that is not false or misleading.

As a rule, we can be confident that our food is safe, as risk management through HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control
Points) has long been established to manage food safety, controlling any potential hazards that may be found in food due
to processing faults or human error. However, potential threats and vulnerabilities to the food industry, where food is
deliberately tampered with and potentially contaminated for malicious reasons or for financial gain, have been increasing
over the past few years and these are not specifically identified and mitigated through HACCP.

Notable examples of where food adulteration has taken place in the UK food industry include:

 The horsemeat scandal which hit the headlines in 2013. Burgers being sold in Tesco, Asda, Lidl, Aldi, and Iceland were found to
contain quite high levels of horsemeat and, in some cases, pork and other meats too. The suppliers were committing food fraud
by substituting beef with cheaper meat for economic gain. Tesco’s market value slumped by €360m and sales of frozen burgers
dropped by 43% as a result.

 In 2020, a farmer was found guilty at the Old Baily of contaminating baby food jars with shards of metal as part of a £1.5m
blackmail plot. He began threatening Tesco in spring 2018, writing to his local store in Lincolnshire and warning them that
unless they paid him £750,000 worth of bitcoin, an online currency that would allow him to remain anonymous, he would
contaminate the food on their shelves. He demanded larger sums of money, telling Tesco that he would also contaminate jars
with salmonella, white powder, and knives. His activities had escalated, as a mum in Lockerbie discovered small knife fragments
in the baby food that she was about to give her child. A nationwide product recall was issued, and the public was kept safe due
to the swift action taken by the supermarket, police, and other agencies.

 In August 2021, three supermarkets in Fulham were closed after a man was found injecting items with an unknown chemical
using a syringe. These stores were closed temporarily, and shoppers were instructed to throw away everything they had
purchased.

As the total consumer expenditure on food, drink, and catering in 2021 was £240bn and the value of food and drink
exports in 2021 was £20.2bn, the food sector is a multibillion-pound industry, employing in the first quarter of 2022, 4.1m
people, 13.4% of GB employment. It is therefore imperative that the sector has in place procedures which will identify
potential threats and vulnerabilities and specify methods to counteract them, in order to protect consumers and the
industry as a whole. Economically motivated adulteration and food fraud is the biggest threat to food safety, and it costs
the food industry £11bn a year in the UK alone.

TACCP and VACCP work together with HACCP to ensure safety throughout the food chain; both are designed to prevent the
adulteration of food.

TACCP.
TACCP is the acronym for Threat Assessment and Critical Control Points. This is all about food defence and the focus is on
food tampering, intentional adulteration, or contamination of food. TACCP builds upon the existing processes of HACCP in
ensuring the safety of food products. HACCP is about managing food safety hazards in the food chain; TACCP aims to
protect food products from deliberate contamination with the intention to cause harm (behaviourally or ideologically
motivated).

TACCP implementation involves thinking like a potential attacker and examines vulnerability, likelihood, opportunities and
an appreciation that intentional contamination requires human intervention. TACCP helps to proactively identify and
manage control points in the supply chain that can be at risk of intentional contamination.
VACCP.
VACCP is the acronym for Vulnerability Assessment and Critical Control Points. The focus is more on adulteration for
financial gain in the supply chain.

For example:

 Product substitution.
 Bulking out with a cheaper ingredient.
 The sale of counterfeit or stolen goods.

VACCP is a special type of risk assessment that helps identify and control vulnerabilities in the food supply chain that can
be exposed to economically motivated food fraud. Unlike HACCP, which identifies all the potential hazards that can enter
food unintentionally, VACCP is concerned with preventing food fraud, which is the intentional contamination of food
during its production. This is usually done for economically motivated reasons.

In a vulnerability assessment, a food business will look for vulnerabilities in its production processes and supply chain to
work out the points at which food fraud can happen. This is useful because it makes it easier to complete a threat
assessment and identify the specific kind of food fraud that can occur.

Food fraud occurs when food or drink is sold in a way that deliberately misleads or deceives consumers or customers for
financial gain. Food crime interventions demonstrate the UK food safety authorities’ ability to receive, assess and respond
to intelligence concerning food crime. The National Food Crime Unit focuses its work on seven types of food crime,
including food fraud.

VACCP is concerned with preventing two of these:

1. Adulteration – including a foreign substance which is not on the product’s label to lower costs or fake a higher
quality.
2. Substitution – replacing a food or ingredient with another substance that is similar but inferior.

Processes of and the management of risk and risk assessments.

Risk Management - Risk management consists of identifying hazards, evaluation of the level of risk and how severe the
risk level in the workplace. When this evaluation is done the risk control measures are recommended, further the risk
management provides to analyse how safe the workplace can be made and how the risk can be avoided. Risk management
is a repetitive process consisting of a detailed observation of hazards and risks and the regular practice of work that goes
on in the workplace.

The ultimate objectives of Risk management are the following:

 Foresee the hazards and risk and address those promptly.

 Conduct risk assessment in all the corners of the company.
 Organize the types of hazards and risk and plan the suitable measures.
 Maintain the data and statistics in order to analyze the level that can help in taking decisions.
 To enhance the employee performance and develop a safety culture in the company.
 To avoid further risks in the workplace through regular assessments in the workplace.
 Upgrade and update the procedures and equipment of the workplace depending on the observations during the
risk assessment.
 To provide considerable information, instruction, and training.
 To define personal protective equipment suitable for the workers as per the level of risk.

Risk management straightaway drive towards the evaluation of the level of the risk present in the workplace. The
evaluation determines the risk either to be acceptable or tolerable. It defines the estimated risk considering the perception
of the workers. It is must for the employer and the employees to know what hazards and risks exist in the place they work.
Evaluation of risk consists of the following steps which need to be followed in every workplace.

 First and foremost is to identify the hazards that can be potential to cause accidents or even minor injury.
 Secondly, it is also a must to identify who might be harmed and how they might be harmed.
 Thirdly, evaluate the level of risk that the hazard could have on the workers.
  Fourth, decide the suitable precautions and while deciding this the utmost priority must be to eliminate the
hazard if not minimize the risk because of that hazard.
 Fifth is to review the evaluation and the precautions taken and how those will be implemented.

During this risk evaluation there are various levels of risk we need to define, and the risk levels should be prioritized. Risk is
a combination of likelihood and consequences. The product of the risk with respect to likelihood and consequences could
be defined through the risk assessment matrix where we define the level of risk acceptable. There could be multiple risks
which could be a combination of various types of hazards. There could be physical hazards pertaining to noise, vibration,
slip trips and falls. There could be chemical hazards consisting of various substances which can cause dangerous illnesses.
The other type of hazard is biological hazards consisting of viruses, fungi, and waste. Ergonomic hazards affecting the
musculoskeletal system due to loading and loading or improper way of working.

We also must understand that the risk evaluation is nothing but identification and determination of risk in a qualitative or
quantitative way. Quantitative level of risk is defined based on calculations which enumerates the clarity to understand the
level of risk compared to the qualitative level of risk.